Soapbox Saturday–Holidays Gone Overboard?

So it’s been a while, but I read a post this week that I felt would resonate with many of you.

Kristen from Rage Against the Minivan wrote how in recent years, every minor holiday from St.Patrick’s day to Pi day have become major holidays that her children expected to celebrate and celebrate in some elaborate way.

She also talks about how there is a new holiday almost every month at school and the kids are expected to make, buy, or bring something to class. Who has time for that? Pi Day, Johnny Appleseed Day, 100 days of school, Dr. Suess’ birthday, and the list goes on…But it’s not as a simple as a card for Valentine’s day anymore. Now parents send full goodie bags of treats, making it a second Halloween.

Source: Rage Against the Minivan

Luckily, I don’t have school age children yet so I haven’t directly had to deal with it, but I have seen in this Pinterest age how the ‘bar’ has been raised and like Kristen mentions, St. Patrick’s Day is no longer a day to simply wear green. Now kids expect to find gold coins, chocolate, and some kind of leprechaun prank. I agree with Kristen in that expectations have gotten out of control. I don’t mind if parent’s choose to go all out at home and in their own traditions, but it seems like school and Pinterest are setting up other parents to look like slackers.  I definitely think there is room for fun traditions, but I do agree that society has made kids come to expect Easter as a second Christmas and other holidays to be similarly celebrated.

For my family, we keep things simple. For St.Patrick’s day I pinned a shamrock on the boys shirts and Curt requested corned beef and cabbage. Other than that, the day went by unnoticed (honestly because I have no idea what the holiday is about – lol).

So basically, I don’t mind if you enjoy going all out at home. I just think it’s sad that sometimes the true meaning of the holiday is overshadowed by elves, candy, and presents. I hope that my kids will appreciate the traditions we establish and not come to expect presents every month. I think it can be fun to celebrate these smaller holidays with family time. No need for spending gobs of money on decorations and presents. 

What do you think? Do you have school age kids and find this to be true? Are you exhausted from the never ending parties and celebrations or do you enjoy going all out?

Easter Wreath

This post comes from my family blog, before I started this craft blog so some of you who follow both, may have already seen this, but since Easter is coming up I figured it was appropriate.

 I got the idea for an Easter wreath at Life, Marriage and Motherhood. I love dollar store crafts. In all it cost me $3.

It was so easy to put this together. You just need a wreath form and these eggs on sticks (lol what else do you call them?) from Dollar Tree. I just cut down the sticks and slid the eggs randomly into the form and put some hot glue on them to hold them in place.

I made this wreath last year, but I was thinking you could also make the eggs like I did for the Easter Egg Tree and glue them on. That way you can keep the same color scheme between the two decorations.

Easter Egg Tree

So I know I've skipped over St. Patrick's Day, but I'm getting ready for an upcoming craft club so I needed to prepare an example. This project was inspired by Martha Stewart, although she used real eggs that had been dyed and emptied out. I wasn't that brave so I went ahead and just used plastic eggs from the Dollar Store.

I started by gluing the egg closed. When it was dry I Mod Podged a couple different materials onto the egg;

Fabric:

Scrap book paper:

And printed tissue paper:

 

The fabric and tissue paper were the easiest to apply to the egg, but I like how they all turned out.

So after Mod Podging the material to the eggs and applying a coat of Mod Podge to the outside, I waited until they were dry and whipped out the drill. I carefully drilled a hole in each end and with a long thin needle I threaded ribbon through with the loop at the smaller end.

Tie a knot at both end right up against the egg and you're done! I embellished one with some rickrack, you could also use buttons, glitter, rhinestones, basically anything you choose.

I put the whole thing together by gathering some branches from some nearby trees and arranging them in this little planter. 

I love how it turned out and if you're able to find some cute artificial branches you could make this a year round thing, hanging little decorations for each holiday. I'm gonna give it a try, I'll let you know how it goes.